Heal the battle with your Inner Rebel

Many people find it surprising – and a bit of playful irony – that when they explore their relationship with sugar, they find that their real “issue” wasn’t really sugar at all – but how they related to their emotional, physical, spiritual, and relational needs.

It was the gaps and troughs and valleys of these unmet, denied, and minimized needs that translated into a strong neediness and drive for sugar.

From this perspective, the healing process with sugar is then two fold:

To connect – to relate honestly, tenderly, and compassionately to the unmet needs that lie underneath the sugar – and to grieve.

As you care for what’s underneath, the drive for sugar softens. In this way, you’re not trying to cope with or manage cravings, you’re facing, softening and unwinding what feeds those cravings in the first place, replacing the false refuge of “sugar” with a true refuge, within your being.

As for grieving, when you change how you eat and use sugar, you’re being asked to grow – and in growing, we die a little. In dying, we grieve. We grieve for the sorrow that lies underneath the sugar and that is arising for attention.

And we grieve for the loss of sugar itself.

For in our healing journey, our typical patterns with sugar – how we binge on or seek out sugar for comfort when we’re feeling overwhelmed, stressed, scared or frustrated – must die.

They have to.

The thought of this can feel overwhelming.

But what is dead must remain dead. Obsessively eating sugar has no life in it. It will never bring the life or love or ease that we hope it will bring. To quote J.R.R. Tolkien, “The way is shut. It was made by those who are Dead. And the Dead keep it.”

This dying process may sound frightening, or even harsh, but there is a deep belly of compassion at its core. When we let go of what doesn’t work – and no matter how much sugar we eat, it doesn’t work: it doesn’t bring the lasting relief, ease, and joy that we imagine it to – there is space for new life to birth what longs to arise on the other side.

On the other side of this sugar “death” there is satiation, rest, connection, belonging, and ease – what the heart thirsts for. There is rest from the pursuit of what doesn’t work, and what will never work. There is rest from grasping after fruitless pleasure. There is rest from striving – all the exhausting, painful trying to “fix the self.”

This rest is out of our grasp as long as we continue to obsessively pursue and fixate on sugar.

And so, we rise, and we walk – we walk through the dying, the letting go of sugar, and into the land of the living.

The deeper story: the third thing to transform your relationship with sugar

And…that’s not all there is.

There’s a third thing that you’re being asked to do to foster a transformation in your relationship with sugar.

This is not something that you do but, rather, something that you open to.

For there is something else that is coming through your willingness to walk with sugar, your willingness to shine a light on what lurks underneath, and your willingness to journey through this valley of healing, death and letting go.

It, too, is a profound and deep mercy, and I’ll try to paint this third thing, this “something else” in words. It speaks to the very soul of sugar, and how it is trying to speak to you.

Here’s a go: what if your sugar journey is not there to punish, but to help? What if your wrestling match with sugar is not an aberration, but something consequential, something meaningful, and even, dare I say, intentional?

What if there is something that sugar is asking of you – that you are powerfully needed and being purposefully called, through sugar – and that your response to this need and this call is what you’re facing, right now? The choice that is in front of you?

And what if you’ve wrestled with sugar long enough to get to this very point, where you’re able to look sugar squarely in the eye, and see this need, this calling, how it longs to speak to you and use you – and that being able to witness this is, itself, a gift, and a blessing upon your head and heart?

What if something has lain dormant in you for a long time now – a spark, a seed, a hidden potential. This hidden potential longs to sprout, and rise, and bear fruit. So it is restless, and roaming. It seeks a worthy and sacred labor, something that would allow you to rise up, to bring the most deeply human and holy aspects of your being up to the surface of your life, and to bring them into form, into being, into this terra firma.

What if this “something” – this seed – is sprouting, is being nourished, and is being sown in you through this thing called sugar? What if sugar is what is calling this hidden potential forth?

What if your wrestling match with sugar is a holy and sacred labor, and you, by submitting to this labor, become a midwife – a midwife of qualities – things like strength, mercy, love, compassion, commitment, gratitude, forgiveness – that would not be born had you not agreed to this wrestling, to this sacred laboring?

What if your soul is longing to grow down, into its most beautiful and holy aspects, through sugar?

And what if that is where you find yourself today, and what is being asked of you?

What if you are being asked, first and foremost, to love?

And what if you’re being asked to do this through sugar?

What if, indeed, “you are the one you’ve been waiting for?” That as Rumi said, “what you’ve been seeking is also seeking you?”

And how, my friend, will you answer?

This “third thing,” this call to love, to serve, and to allow yourself to be birthed through sugar, is, I believe, the angel that walks with you through the dying and letting go process with sugar. It’s what makes the dying process doable and feasible and even, dare I say, welcome.

This call to love transforms how we look at our necessary death with sugar, to see and know and taste the profound mercy at its core, and to walk towards the new life that awaits, fecund and arising.

to cut out eating the particular food or food group (sugar) that we’re obsessing about altogether

or to wish that the whole problem would just go away already.

These reactions are understandable. It can feel terrifying and frustrating to be caught in something like craving and obsession, to be caught in the thing you wish you didn’t do, to feel out of control.

It is also vulnerable – for when we struggle with something, we confront the limits of our power and of our will.

We often know more than we are able to do; we can often see farther than we reach. This gap – the difference between what we yearn to do and what we are able to do in the moment – can be a source of tremendous frustration and humility. For in it, we meet our vulnerability, our undeveloped parts, and all the little, painful, small, messy bits of ourselves.

In this gap we come face to face with our very humanity. And in this gap, we also encounter the subtle ways we judge, shame and fear ourselves for it.

Our judgment primarily appears as resistance – the degree to which we believe, argue against, or feel that we shouldn’t be feeling the way we’re feeling in the moment.

Our judgment also appears as control – the many ways we try to feel differently, to change our experience, to turn it into something better, “cleaner,” or more comfortable. We expend a tremendous amount of energy and work very, very hard trying to make ourselves or the situation different.

In both cases, the way in which we approach ourselves in these moments of vulnerability reveals a common desire to eradicate and overpower, often in the name of healing.

Let’s make this concrete. You’re going through your day, feeling okay, but then a craving for sugar arrives.

What do you feel? How do you react? What thoughts go through your mind? What do you tell yourself? What do you believe about yourself in those moments?

Oh, this simple longing, this pure craving: it is a barren and outcast thing.

Rather than offering up a tender reverence – a deep listening to what the craving is expressing or longing for or asking of us – we tend to tighten up and close down in the face of this unwanted, unloved, disregarded guest. This can appear in a number of ways.

We may feel anxious and threatened by it – how do I make this feeling go away?

We may hide: we may feel frightened or guilty or ashamed about what our feelings and cravings say about us.

We may go to war to eradicate the feeling. We often do this with very subtle means – with nutritional hacks, self help tools and spiritual practices – that, on the surface, look productive, well intentioned, and helpful.

These tools are not wrong in themselves; there is a season and place for everything. But they are often employed from a mindset of judgment, of wrongness, arising from a belief that the craving shouldn’t be there in the first place, is a sign that something’s wrong, and therefore needs to go away.

Of course, underneath the craving is often a judgment against ourselves: that it’s somehow our own damn fault that we’re feeling what we’re feeling, that we’re craving the cookie or the ice cream or the chocolate. Feeding our judgment is the guilt and responsibility we feel for being human – for having this very human feeling – in the first place.

This tangled web of fear, guilt, shame, (over)responsibility and control spins us around and around and around. It’s excruciating – a searing source of separation – and doesn’t lead to possibility, understanding or renewal with sugar, ourselves, or with the relationship that we have to either.

It also breaks our own hearts. For in saying “no” to our cravings, we make ourselves – where we find ourselves in the moment – outcasts of love.

There is an alternative, and I’d like to offer this perspective to you.

It starts with how we see. What if we stepped back and looked at sugar, cravings, and food from a depth, mythic, or soul perspective?

I’ve found that this perspective offers up a more workable, more respectful, and more life affirming approach to cravings and food obsession – one that doesn’t ask us to go to war or break our hearts or shame our humanity in the process.

It begins with the question: who is the one doing the craving?

The call and craving for food/sugar is not a reprimand or mistake, but a cry that arises from the soul. Yes, they can be the byproduct of trauma, of painful childhood wounds, or of developmental stuckness. And this is not all they are.

The cry for sugar is not something negative to be cast out, but something essential, important, necessary, and even beautiful – a part of the soul of the world and a part of your unique soul, unfolding and expressing itself.

This call, this craving, has its place and its belonging and its purpose, and is something beyond the control of either the ego or the personality, although they may feel threatening to both. This is why whenever the angels bring such messages, they begin with a reassurance: fear not.

The cravings are meant and are longing to arise. Their call, and their source, is from something much deeper than the surface you, from the One itself, and therefore, are not meant to be under control of the human mind, will, or ego. They are meant to unfurl, to speak to and transform us in their unfurling.

This deeper meaning frees us both from the burden of responsibility for causing (or not preventing) them as well as the judgment that something is wrong in that they arise at all.

It also frees us from the role of the “fixer,” the one who needs to fix our problem with sugar: what a burden for anyone to carry!

We, in turn, respond and are responsible to (not responsible for) this call of the soul. We become its steward. We heed its harbinging message. We move from a position of control, anxiety, or fear into a position of surrender, listening, and humble service.

To put it simply: we stop making ourselves wrong for craving and become more curious about what the craving is pointing towards. This softens the alarm that drives so much of our compulsive behavior around sugar, food, and the body.

We offer ourselves in service to the sugar craving, to the soul, to the longing and growth that our soul is asking of us. In our response, something in us arises and bursts forth – something that would not have arisen without this soul’s call, without this craving.

In this, our offering, the pain and suffering and loss of addiction and compulsion transforms into an act of renewal, an act of birth and creation and regeneration: an offering that we send out back both to the soul of the world, and to our own soul.

From this perspective, the hot spot of craving is not something to be feared or avoided, but a crucible of growth and transformation. In our feelings and cravings – where our desire, yearnings, fears, and vulnerability collide – we are also met with a tremendous opportunity.